protocam

 Electronics, Raspberry Pi Camera, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  3 Responses »
Sep 292014
 
protocam

In my previous blog post I started a series on how to program a KickStarter tracker. That will continue soon. In the meantime, one of the KickStarter campaigns I’ve been tracking is for a nice little board called the ProtoCam. It’s a simple, but original, idea by Richard Saville, who blogs under the name of ‘AverageManVsRaspberryPi’. (His emphasis is on quality articles, often with complete ‘how-tos’ for specific things he’s learned to do.) So he came up with this original idea for a prototyping board with space for a Pi camera on. You can put […more…]

Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 1.

 python programming, raspberry pi  9 Responses »
Sep 222014
 
Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 1.

Ever since the HDMIPi KickStarter I’ve been very interested in watching the progress of other campaigns. I’m following four or five Pi-based campaigns at the moment. Are they going to make it? Are they not? It’s nice to keep an eye on things. But monitoring more than one or two wastes a lot of time. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could have a little computer and screen set up so that it checked these campaigns, say, once a minute, and reported on how they’re doing? I know there’s a decent Python library called urllib2. […more…]

Raspberry Pi SmartWatch Joke

 Electronics, python programming, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  1 Response »
Sep 152014
 
Raspberry Pi SmartWatch Joke

A Raspberry Pi SmartWatch? You’re kidding me right? Errrm. Yes. I mean… Well… This has a lot of the functionality of a smartwatch, but it wasn’t built for that purpose. It’s a little big, for starters. Let me back up and explain. Last week, Apple released photos of their new smartwatch. Twitter, Google+ and every social network was awash with photos, comparison photos, criticism, analysis and good old-fashioned Apple-hating. By Thursday I was rather bored of it all, so I decided to make a joke tweet. I had this rather large Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) […more…]

VGA for Pi Debuts at CamJam, alongside HDMIPi production model No. 1

 Electronics, Input and Output, Raspberry Pi Hardware  41 Responses »
Sep 072014
 
VGA for Pi Debuts at CamJam, alongside HDMIPi production model No. 1

I went to the Cambridge Jam yesterday and displayed HDMIPi production model #1, met lots of people, including Eben, Liz, and a multitude of Pi enthusiasts and bloggers (quite normal for a #CamJam). There was also a CNBC news crew there to film some Pi action. They shot a brief clip of me doing something like this… Matt Hawkins @RPiSpy kindly took this one for me using my camera. Good job he’s not a monkey, or we might have a copyright dispute. It was really nice to spend some time chatting to Matt. (Thanks for […more…]

Turtlteck – Ryan’s new Turtle Robot

 Electronics, Review  No Responses »
Sep 042014
 
Turtlteck - Ryan's new Turtle Robot

Many of you probably will have heard of Ryan Walmsley, the guy who created Raspberry Pi tracker Rastrack. Ryan’s been working for several months on a robotics project he’s called Turtlteck. It’s basically a simple wheeled robot with a microcontroller board which he’s programmed to act rather like a classic “turtle”. You program it with the direction buttons and hit the middle button to make it ‘GO’. I backed the project on KickStarter early on because it’s interesting and because, even though it doesn’t directly involve the Raspberry Pi, Ryan’s budding electronics business stems largely […more…]

RPi.GPIO – port function checker

 Input and Output, interfacing, python programming, raspberry pi  10 Responses »
Sep 012014
 
RPi.GPIO - port function checker

A few weeks ago I blogged about RPi.GPIO updates for the model B and updated my RPi.GPIO documentation and quick reference sheets. But there was one feature I held back on because I needed a bit more time to mess about with it. (And then got busy with other things.) So What Was It? gpio_function() Another RPi.GPIO feature that sneaked in while I wasn’t looking is gpio_function() This is a feature that’s been inserted in RPi.GPIO to enable you to query the setup status of a port to see how it’s configured. import RPi.GPIO as […more…]